Cards on the table, gang: I’ve spent most of the last 18 months off my tits on painkillers. Not to a Jacko/Prince/stomach-pump degree, but enough to take the edge off my do-gooding and let evil have its way with the world. It’s no coincidence I was out of it when Brexit Brexitted and Trump trumped, when white supremacists showed their faces again, when Nazis rebranded and all manner of clusters were fucked. It’s been like Bane taking over Gotham after Batman got stuck down that well. As Edmund Burke once said, the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to knacker their spines and chug handfuls of gabapentin.

But even in my diminished state I need to get back involved in the world, see through the grogginess and fog that surrounds me, ignore the 40-strong male choir in the corner and the unicorns firing rainbows out of their eyes. There’s do-gooding to be done-gooded. People, it’s time for a Zero-patented, guilt-ridden, non-Scientologist audit!

Onto veggieness. Even in the fog of my lost weekend I’ve not strayed from the righteous path of vegetarianism for the delicious path of actual flavour. I’ve not eaten a single piece of meat, fish or fowl, not even accidentally during one of those unfortunate overseas mix-ups I fucking live for. But I’ve got slack on checking beer and wine for isinglass because it’s a pain in the balls, and all my beloved painkillers will have been tested on animals and have often come in gelatine capsules. And while I’ve made a kind of peace with how the pharmaceutical industry rolls it’s a fractious, uneasy peace like you’d find between Star Wars trilogies. I also lean heavily on dairy, cramming eggs and cheese and milk into my facehole with no regard for how chickens and cows are treated once I’m done with them, knowing it’s unlikely to be gently. Maybe it’s time to take a couple more steps towards the living hell of veganism. On veggieness, let’s say eight Zero points and only a light flogging to my second-numbest finger.

Next, the big fat mess of global inequality, gender inequality, and the effects of big bidness and the rough end of capitalism. Here I’ve done embarrassingly little. I quit donating to Care International and Water Aid to redirect money elsewhere. It was to another charity but that does nothing to the mustard, let alone cut it. I’ve kept up with Kiva but feel no less conflicted about the ethics and usefulness of microfinance loans. I’ve smashed a bit of the patriarchy in working with perpetrators and survivors of domestic violence, but there’s still plenty of it in need of a smashing. Again, these things have become so embedded in my life and retreated so close to token gestures they no longer feel active with a capital A and an ism. Here I’m getting no Zero points, four thorough floggings and a half membership of the Young Conservatives. I need to do more. People, let’s make a start!

And yes, I had a failed comeback in January ‘14 where I did one entry and fucked off out of it. And yes, I had a second failed comeback in June ‘16 where I did two entries and fucked off out of it. But this will be different, this will be both lasting and meaningful, both gabba and pentin, and when next we meet I’ll turn my audit into goals, and goals into plans, and plans into revolution, and bit by bit we’ll edge this species towards basic decency. I will do this! I will do all of this and more! Or none of it, or less.

As you’re no doubt aware I mothballed the grand Zero project a couple of years ago, having solved every available problem facing us and other species. I kept myself busy, securing Scottish independence, writing a spectacularly unsuccessful screenplay to be read by no one, and ending a spectacularly unsuccessful relationship to devote more time to dying alone. All was going swimmingly. Until Thursday.

As I peered out of the Zero bunker, keen for a spot of fresh air after my 30-month exile, I happened upon an internet and caught up with how things have been going. People, you’ve fucked things up good and proper. Undeterred by five years of Tory-lite coalition you went for a full on Tory majority. Undeterred by history, logic, reason and decency you’re heading for a Donald Trump presidency and a Boris Johnson premiership, and in your spare time you killed basically anyone capable of making music, film, art and telly. But the EU referendum takes the biscuit. Probably literally; Bahlsen were pricey enough already without colossal import tariffs, there’ll be no getting them now.

I wasn’t all that informed about the EU but when The Daily Mail, Donald Trump, Michael Gove and Nigel Farage all tell you to get out, you know to stay clinging to the ankles of Europe as hard as you can. But England’s disaffected lurched to the right, met the racists and xenophobes who’d always been there, and shit got real. Now we’re on our way out, a little island of Little Englanders left alone.

I am gutted. As gutted as when Bush got reelected. As hopeless as when the Tories got back in, stripped welfare to the bone, brought in the bedroom tax among their flagship cruelties. As useless and as irrelevant and ignored and as Other as on a bleak and shitty September morning a couple years back. And I am guilty. I voted, but that’s all I did. I got lazy. I didn’t read enough. Didn’t do enough. I didn’t knock a single door or change a single mind.

I’ve had a couple days of self-pity, another round of referendum hangover. I listened to sad songs, to angry Nina Simone: England Goddam. I got out my Yes gear, put on my t-shirt like a security blanket. I ate ice cream from the tub. And not with a spoon, either, I was like a bear with a jar of honey. I broke up with England again, that hateful, abusive partner. But even in self-pity I felt a pang of hypocrisy. Brexiters wanted out of a union they felt didn’t represent them, that felt distant and disconnected from their worries. I did that in 2014 and will do again when we get the chance, as now seems likely. All that sets us apart is that my worries aren’t mostly bullshit from the side of a lying bus.

But I’m past all that. I’m back, and on the lookout for which bottoms we should kick first. And it’s touching to learn how deeply I was missed. Logging in to the Zero site, I had literally hundreds of thousands of comments waiting for me, most of which I assume were demanding my triumphant return, though the few I read were mostly offering me knock-off handbags and easy money and giant packs of cock pills. Point is, I’m back on it. Onward, Zeroes, to victory!

Like most failed bloggers I prefer to think of myself more generally as a failed writer. I’ve failed to finish that novel I was working on, failed to put on that play I was thinking about. I’ve been ignored by the finest literary agents this country has to offer, been knocked back by the most prominent production companies working today and had a sitcom rejected by none other than the British Broadcasting Corporation. I’ve failed completely at the very highest of levels.

My current, top secret project – top secret not for reasons of secrecy but because no bugger will ever read it – is moving slowly towards completion. Of a shaky first draft. Here we have perhaps the first screenplay to successfully combine a searing examination of the human condition – the banality of existence, the futility of optimism – with gags about poo and Elia Kazan. It’s sure to delight audiences young and old and/or the shoebox it’ll end up sitting in. Sadly, the time spent crafting this soon to be rejected masterpiece is eating into the time spent on matters of Zero, meaning this blog has lately seen less activity than Val Kilmer’s voicemail.

He doesn’t work much, see. Right now I’m tip-toeing through the first act of the first draft, stopping every now and then to rework the structure, rejig the characters, rework my rejiggings and cry myself to sleep. It’s slow, emotionally punishing work. I’m in every respect yer classic tortured artist, if you ignore the almost total absence of actual talent. During the current stage of anguished character regiggery I’m doing what all right-on, air-punching, petition-Tweeting non-activists should do: I’m checking my privilege.

Where we are right now, this thing’s character base is about as diverse as UKIP’s mailing list. The lead character’s a man. So are two of his three friends. So’s his manager, the only character in a position of power. There are two women: both potential love interests, both underwritten and bland, one worrying close to movie-kook. Every character is white, kind of: I’ve not mentioned ethnicity but if I picture them they’re as white as I am. Every character is straight, at least when sexuality gets a mention. All but one are able-bodied. It’s a hundred percent evident this thing’s been written by a white, able-bodied, heterosexual man.

Some of this is justifiable, even necessary. Being vaguely autobiographical, and being as how its writer has a very limited imagination, we’ve got a me-alike in the lead role. That could change but it would take a spot of talent, imagination and skill which are qualities I don’t have so much as lack completely. It’s set in the dead-end, white-ass small town I grew up in. Too much in the way of skin colour would blow it, open the place up more than it is. The sexuality thing I can’t excuse. The gender thing’s lousy.

This isn’t the only piece of work in the world. It doesn’t have to be wholly representative or packed full of underrepresented types to balance out all the white-ass, hetero-centric, male-dominated anti-feminist balls there is in the world. But I can do better than a bunch of white, able-bodied straight guys and the women they fancy. Naturally, all this hand-wringing brings to mind the Bechdel Test. Back in 1985 cartoonist Alison Bechdel was working on Dykes to Watch Out For, a comic strip we’ve all heard of and read regularly and if you haven’t you’re homophobic and shame on you. In one strip, some character or other says she’ll only see films if (i) they have at least two women in them who (ii) talk to each other about (iii) something besides a man. Barely anything passes this test.

Naysayers and contrarians have taken issue with this, noting sexist clag like Showgirls passes the test while something like Gravity, which has a decent lead female role, fails on technicalities. But to miss the point so completely would be to completely miss the point. Most films limit their female characters to decorative fuck toys or incidental nobodies. I’m not going to write like that. Even if my thing gets read by hardly anyone, seen by nobody and liked by nobody else, it matters to not write like that.

As long-time readers of The Zero will know, I try very hard to be always slightly behind the times, a good few feet from the cutting edge, only vaguely aware of what the French call ‘Le Zeitgeist’. You’ll recall how a few weeks back there was a bit of media interest in the campaign against so-called lads’ mags and the lousy, exploitative, demeaning, sexualised, woman-hating culture they encourage. That interest having more or less died down it’s time for me to get writing like it’s something new. (Next week we’ll be looking at the environmental dangers of chlorofluorocarbons or ‘CFCs’).

As you’ll be aware from being alive in the world we live in, ours is a society where women are demeaned, harassed abused and murdered. There’s a sliding scale at work here, starting with wolf-whistling like a woman’s going to find that attractive, through treating women as sex objects in pornography and prostitution, through one in four women experiencing domestic violence, and ending in groping, sexual assault, rape and murder. It’s on us reasonably enlightened humans to change every step of the scale. To that end, these past few months have seen an exciting bit of do-goodery from the world of social networking. The No More Page 3 campaign, which is looking to get naked women out of newspapers as if naked women aren’t actually news, has been going down a storm thanks to Twitter, Facebook and Changes. It now has more than 107,000 signatories on its petition, including nearly half our female MPs. Similarly, the campaigns to get rape jokes and misogynistic hate crime hijinks off Facebook have been doing well, with over 50,000 people tweeting in support of the FBrape campaign organised by the likes of Everyday Sexism and Women, Action and the Media (WAM). Under their campaign 5,000 people contacted advertisers who appeared on pages promoting or minimising sexual violence, and 225,000 signed a separate petition demanding the pages be removed.

Of course, it’s results rather than participation that counts; we could have people in their millions bleating and tweeting their outrage being ignored by everyone that matters, like that bit in Ghostbusters when Rick Moranis is being chased by a big demonic dog and starts banging on the window of a restaurant and everyone goes back to eating and exploiting women horribly. Fortunately the Facebook bashing seems to be getting a response. Advertisers including BskyB, Marks and Spencer, Nationwide and Nissan suspended their advertising and Facebook, being keener on money than it is on people, shifted from quietly ignoring the campaign to getting a bit tetchy to actually agreeing to do something about its content policy. This is clictivism actually affecting some change.

So back to this lads’ mags thing. These are the magazines – yer Nuts, Yer Zoo, yer FHM – that pretend they’re not pornography by having front covers of naked women covering their nipples, that turn the crude objectification of women into an interest alongside cars, beer and football. They pander to rather than invent these cavemen attitudes, but their pandering doesn’t help much in a world that needs to get its shit together. Complain about these magazines, you get people banging on about Victorian prudishness but let’s be clear: this is not an anti-sex thing. This is an anti-sexism thing because these magazines are an anti-women thing. An amazing study from a while back mixed snippets from these magazines with quotes from convicted rapists and asked people to spot the difference. Most couldn’t. Here we’re talking the likes of “Girls ask for it by wearing these mini-skirts and hotpants” and “Girls are like plasticine; if you warm them up you can do anything you want with them”. The world doesn’t need this.

UK Feminista, a group of feminists from the UK, and Object, a group of UK-based feminists, came up with a cracker of an idea. Their Lose the Lads’ Mags campaign says employees and customers in shops selling these things are subject to sexual harassment and discrimination under the Equality Act 2010. They’re asking us to sign a petition, harass Tesco and other big retailers, and spam the hell out of our Facebook and Twitter pals to get these magazines removed. They’re supported by the likes of End Violence Against Women, Women’s Aid, the White Ribbon Campaign, Eaves, Local Mums Online, Imkaan, Aurora, Rape Crisis, Equality Now, Equals and Compass, all of whom are good types whose side you’d want to be on. Get this thing going, these magazines can go the way of tits on beer cans and the world can take another tiny step towards a future free from this kind of backward-looking dickery.

You’ll recall I’ve often said you’ll recall us banging on about the bedroom tax, the government’s effort to reduce the housing benefit bill by giving less housing benefit to people who need it. Here, people lose 14 percent of their benefit for having a spare bedroom and 25 percent for having two spare bedrooms, with the definition of spare rooms including those inhabited by children under the age of ten. It’s a quality piece of work from the people who brought you the knackering of the NHS and the deranged misery of the Atos assessments.

Back in April I joined a public meeting that was looking to get interest stirred up in fighting it. It seemed a grassroots movement was building, with local organisations springing up all over the place. They managed a decent march through the city before joining with other groups to form the Scottish Anti-Bedroom Tax Federation. I’d link to their website but they don’t appear to have one, choosing instead to fight the good fight on the frontlines of 1997. They held a rally yesterday in the centre of Glasgow, having had another march knocked back because there were already two being held that day. They aimed to get people from across the country in a whole Scotland rally, bringing a spot of unity to what risks being a fractured and fractious campaign. I joined them, making my way from Grenyarnia to Glasgow, a city in which much of my Zeroing has taken place though only by chance and not by anything that might suggest where I actually live.

I’ll be honest here, gang: it wasn’t very inspiring. There were a few thousand people making up a pretty slack crowd that drifted and thinned as the thing went on. It was all a bit repetitive, with speaker after speaker saying the same thing, all of which we agreed with but none of which we actually needed to hear. This was preaching very slowly and very repetitively to the choir. And if the point was publicity and a decent crowd photo, there’s not much online today to suggest they got either. Plus there was this guy:

He’s a pretty serious anarchist, him. He’s a dangerous subversive. You can tell because of that comic book he’s read and/or film he’s seen. He needs that mask. He can’t have the pigs identifying him, not with the anti-establishment way he holds his placard at peaceful, legally-organised rallies. He’s probably heard of 4Chan! He’s probably hacked Anonymous! Bless his heart.

But there was also anger and, if not a sense of renewed momentum, then at least a sense that this thing is still going even if it’s stalled a little. The thing is the bedroom tax affects hundreds of thousands of people but they’re still only a small minority. For this thing to work we need people who aren’t affected by it to get angry and join them, for the numbers to swell and the force of momentum to become irresistible. We need a campaign that’s impassioned and organized, one that’s robust and credible and impossible to shout down or argue against or undermine or discredit with cheap shots and diversions.

If you’ve been paying close attention to the worlds of politics, economics and horrific injustices, or if you’ve just been attempting to live in this country at this point in time under this particular government, you’ll have heard about this recession/depression/excuse to impose ideologically-driven cuts to services. The austerity programme that’s designed to turn the economy around while coincidentally satisfying many of the Tories’ ambitions on class warfare has seen some tremendous successes. Not economically, obviously – it’s a disaster by about every measure imaginable – but in screwing over poor people, vital services and basic hope. In our previous times together we’ve ranted about welfare cuts and how they’ll screw people, the bedroom tax and the little sense it makes and the rise of payday loans and the obvious exploitation they represent. For as long as there’s misery knocking about the rants will keep on coming.

Austerity isn’t working. Obviously it isn’t working. If it were working we’d see at least some sign of it working. What we’re seeing instead is sign after sign of it not working, and quote after quote from Cameron and Osborne saying they’ll stay the course as if we’re supposed to admire their stubbornness in the face of failure. This is two rich, privileged people screwing over the poor either because they want to or because they’re too afraid of saying “Oops”.

While the economy continues to do very little in the way of improving, one sector at least is thriving: food banks. This is what we’re resorting to to counter this assault on the poor. In Her Majesty’s United Kingdom of Great Britain and the British Isles and London, in one of the richest countries in the known world, in the age of iPads and botox, we have people begging at food banks to avoid starving to death or stealing to live. The Trussell Trust, which knows about these kinds of things, reckons there’s been a 76% rise in the number of food banks in the last year and a 170% rise in the numbers of people using them. They’re talking 346,992 people in the last year, just over a third of them children. Figures from 2009-10, from back before this government took over and started tearing strips off welfare, were at 40,898. That’s about a 750% increase in the lifetime of this government, this government that’s staying the course.

We should be ashamed of this. We should be ashamed we’re having to resort to this. We should be so angry about this we should be suffering losses of tens of millions of people to rage-related head explosions. We should be so embarrassed our collective blush should make the planets revolve around us thinking maybe we’re a new sun. And somewhere in there we should be maybe half proud people are putting these things together. Trussell, which likes a bit of Jesus but plays it down enough so’s you’d hardly know, reckons 30,000 donors and volunteers are helping out across the country, giving more than 3,400 tonnes of food last year. This is people seeing their communities struggling, pitching in as if poor people are fellow humans in need of a hand. It’s a decent thing they’re doing, even if it’s a lousy thing they’re being decent about, even if their decency shouldn’t be called on. And if Cameron tries to pass this off as The Big Society I’ll kick him square in the cock.

There’s a food bank opened up near us now, a couple minutes walk from social work. We had an email telling us how to use it when service users pitch up saying they’ve got no food for their children and no money to buy any. It’s getting harder to give them money now, with budgets getting tighter and destitution more in fashion thanks to the likes of the bedroom tax. Instead of getting money they’ll go to a needle exchange and ask for cans of beans so they don’t go hungry. It’s a new humiliation for people probably used to being humiliated.

Lousy as it is, it’s the Chazza of the Month. A few quid from me should buy a few cans of stuff; all non-perishable, though it won’t be lying around long. I’ll get a few cans of beans, a few cans of soup, maybe some pasta and some long-life milk. All veggie stuff, obviously. Shitty as this is I’m not above using it for a bit of social engineering.

In the Daily Mail view of the world, white men are an endangered species under attack from women the world over, lesbians in particular, atheists probably somehow and Europe almost certainly. Our only defenders against this tsunami of political correctness gone mad are Jeremy Clarkson with his blue jeans of justice and Nigel Farage with his tell-it-like-it-is pub loudmouth xenophobia. They are our last hope, our only holdouts in a world of womanholes and chairpeople and choirs of lesbians singing Baa Baa Minority Ethnic Origin Sheep. Without them, men would be doomed to perish in the raging fires of our daughters’ misguided bras.

Here at The Zero we like a bit of the old feminism. We like a bit of the world view that says woman is the [racial slur] of the world, that men have been running the place and doing it badly, that men as a group have been doing harm to women as a group since the two groups first got together and one beat hell out of the other and told it it couldn’t vote for about the next 100,000 years.

You can disagree, obviously. All you need to ignore is the sexualisation of women in the media, the difference in salaries for men and women doing the same job, the absence of female presidents and prime ministers, the odd bit of female genital mutilation, the sexual hypocrisy that says a man’s a player and a woman’s a slag, the varying acceptability of male and female nipple exposure, the lousy rates of female education in the developing world, and the history that says on our side education, suffrage, property and liberty have all been denied to women until about the last hundred years. Ignore that and more and your world view holds up pretty solid.

I carried mine into social work, into the domestic violence that features in literally every case I’ve worked. And that’s literally literally, not hyperbolic Facebook status literally. If you know your Zero you’ll recall how I’m working in a city with one of the highest rates of domestic violence in Europe, how I’ve been frustrated by the lack of prevention services for violent men. There are supports for women who’ve lived with these assholes; shelters for women who’ve run from the men doing them harm, safety planning for the women still with them, counselling for women who’ve survived their shit, counselling for children who saw it all, help for children who’ve begun to copy it. But men do this to women, and while the women are getting the support they need the men move on to other women and do the same to them and make more children see it all and maybe learn it for when their time comes.

I’ve got involved in a groupwork project that aims to do something about it, albeit with only half an eye on violence. It’s looking to take the lousy dads on the milder end of the violence spectrum and teach them how to be better parents, teach them how violence isn’t a part of it. It’s inspired by, as opposed to purchased from, an accredited programme that appears to work if you pick the right people. They’re the men who lack confidence in their parenting, men who think raising children is for women, men who are controlling and misogynistic and maybe violent but open to change of some sort. I’m not entirely sure how I feel about it.

Put the violence aside, I’m not even slightly interested in men as a special interest in need of particular attention. I’m embarrassed to be a male worker running a men’s group like it’s a passion of mine. I want to go more direct with violent men, give them a rant about patriarchy and the wrong they’re doing, get them to stop doing it. Logic and common sense and experience tell me that wouldn’t do much, and research from the programme says it wouldn’t do anything at all. Seems you have to approach the subject carefully, plant a few ideas about equity in relationships, about gentleness in childcare. You have to talk about how to put children first, how to be a considerate father, partner and ex-partner, how to respect children and women, how violence is the opposite of all that. And that’s a good thing. At the risk of sounding Daily Mail myself, there’s a clear problem of lousy, irresponsible men drinking their way through their children’s lives if they’re in them at all, beating hell out of their partners, staggering from job centre to jail. There aren’t many of them, they don’t number the army of shirkers the Tories dreamt up and there are reasons for them being how they are. But they’re around and something needs done. I’m just not sure it’s in me to stay away from the violence thing.

But in theory at least, if we can get in early before any major damage is done, if we can reshape even slightly their ideas of what it is to be a man and a partner and a father, if we can turn them onto responsibility and respectability and respectfulness maybe the children they raise won’t beat their partners and their generation will do better than ours and the seven million generations before us. And that’s why I’m currently in my Batman costume scaling the houses of parliament.

Devoted as you are to yer man The Zero, and as closely as you monitor my good works, you’ll be aware I do the odd bit of fundraising in spite of hating it almost completely. The past few years I’ve been meddling with Yaknak Projects, a small charity set up by a few friends to run two children’s home in Nepal. They need £16,000 a year to keep the homes running, a delightful spot of constant pressure that cheers them greatly.

I had a plan to change how they fundraised, to reduce the effort and up the ambition a bit. First, I wanted to change the kind of events we took on and the kind of money we aimed for, going for fewer events but doing them on a bigger scale and making them repeatable year on year. Second, I wanted to up the amount brought in by regular donors, aiming towards the all-of-it mark. Third, I wanted to get some decent chunks out of grants and trusts if the first two parts of the plan didn’t cover us.

A couple of years ago we started stage one, rounding up friends, friends of friends, co-workers and co-workers’ friends to run a 10k or half marathon. We had a team of 13 aiming for about £4,000, a figure almost stupidly ambitious against what we’d had before. We got about £7,500 once we counted Gift Aid. I can’t even tell you the level of smugness I was walking around with. I’m talking Gwyneth Paltrow.

Last year we started stage two, the regular donors thing. In the world of fundraising, regular donations are the joy of joys. You ask someone for money once and they keep giving it to you month after month, and all you’ve got to do check your bank statements to see if they’ve stopped. Back before we started on this we were getting a couple of hundred a month from the trustees and a friend or two but mostly when we encouraged people to give regularly they responded by not doing that at all. We changed how we went about asking, talking up the idea of being a small band of dedicated noble types helping to keep this small charity going. People started giving and got us up to £8,500 a year, more than half our running costs. At that point, by comparison, Gwyneth was looking modest, full of doubt and insecurities.

Last year brought us down a Paltrow or two. Rerunning the runs we had a lot of people who said they’d be up for it didn’t bother. We ended up with fewer runners and a lot less cash, coming out with about £3,500; a top-five fundraiser but disappointing against the first year. And there’s no Plan B with this stuff, there’s no one writing cheques if we don’t bring in the cash. It’s just us.

This week I got started on the third, hopefully still annual, big fundraiser. Here we’re looking to get people running again but also figuring ways to get lazier types to do something they’re at least halfway up for. So far we’ve nicked the idea of feeding yourself for a pound a day from whichever charity thought it up first, and added the Daal Bhat Challenge where, like a native Nepali, you have to eat curry and rice three times a day for a week. The trick is now to find people who can be bothered doing this and get them to do it, and find people who can’t be bothered and see if we can get them to do it too. The trick is then to find people who want to give us money and have them give it to us, and find people who want to keep their money and see if we can take at least a little from them.

There’s a brutal bit of maths here. We need £7,500. If we set a realistic average of £150 sponsorship per entrant, excluding Gift Aid, we need about 40 people. They’d put us to £6,000, with Gift Aid taking us to £7,500. We’ve got four trustees plus me who have basically no choice about doing this, and four people who’ve already signed to triathlons and half marathons. That leaves us with 31 people to recruit. We’ve got 13 people from the past two years we can ask, some of whom might be interested. That leaves us with a minimum of 18 new people to find. And we’re not the Race for Life, we can’t go putting up posters on subways or adverts on TV. This is ambitious for us. This is pressure. This is an assload of consequences just waiting.

The thing with fundraising is you have to dress it up like it’s fun. You have to be all positive and win people over with charm and enthusiasm and flattery. I have to put aside the panic and the maths that keeps me awake. Trying to get money from people, I tell them how much good it’s going to do. What keeps me awake is the opposite of that. It’s the absence of their money and the bad things its absence will do. If we don’t bring in this cash what’ll happen is we don’t pay rent on the boys’ houses and we don’t buy them food. We take them out of school and out of the houses and put them back in the orphanages they were living in before, in the orphanages where 150 children cram in together. We will fail them completely. We need to get this money.

That whooshing noise you just heard was the sound of my sphincter closing shut.

As I’ve often said, I very much believe the children are our future. Teach them well, I’ve often said, and thereafter watch them lead the way. I also very much believe when the night falls the loneliness calls. And that you should give me one moment in time.

Look around the world of social work, you see how undereducation knackers people almost completely. How adults struggle with the basics of reading and writing, how they work shitty jobs or no jobs at all, how their confidence takes a dive, how they don’t value education because it did nothing for them, how they pass that on to their kids. Look around the world of the rest of the world, you’ll see how undereducation knackers everything almost completely and how male dickheads are stopping millions of girls getting an education. UNICEF agrees with me here, as it so often does, pointing to the links with child labour, sexual exploitation, the spread of HIV and AIDS, child mortality and other awfulnesses. Get girls into education, you grow educated women. That’ll be why the dickhead men aren’t so into it.

You’ll recall how Malala Yousafzai is a 15-year-old girl from the Swat District of Pakistan. Back in 2009, when she was 11 and the Taliban were banning girls’ education and blowing up their schools, she blogged for the BBC’s Diary of a Pakistani Schoolgirl under the pseudonym of Gul Makai. She wrote about how her dad’s school was slowly emptying, how her English teacher couldn’t make it in because of a curfew, how she got death threats on the way home. Clever as she was, brave as she was, she gave up her anonymity to feature in Adam Ellick and Irfan Ashraf’s documentary, Class Dismissed, which, you should be warned, includes shots of corpses left in the streets after the Taliban was done with them. Malala did a few interviews speaking out against the Taliban’s repression, got known for it, and in October 2011 was nominated for the Children’s Peace Prize. In October 2012, as she sat on her school bus after finishing an exam, she was shot in the head by some Taliban prick. Their spokesman called her activism “a new chapter of obscenity” and threatened the media for its unsympathetic accounts of their attempted assassination of a schoolgirl because what they lack in humanity they also lack in self-awareness.

Malala survived. The single bullet passed through her head and neck and stopped in her shoulder, not far from her spine. She was in a coma for days, passing through hospitals in Pakistan on her way to a specialist place in England. She regained consciousness after her arrival there and started her long recovery. She was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize and last month returned to education, starting her GCSEs in a school in Birmingham on her way to becoming a doctor and/or politician. She is so many kinds of awesome you can’t keep count of it all.

In her honour, and working with her and her family, Vital Voices Global Partnership set up the Malala Fund to campaign for and enable girls’ education. In April, Malala announced the fund’s first grant, paying for the education of 40 girls in the Swat Valley. It was, she said, the happiest moment of her life. I assume being named as the Chazza of the Month bumps it to second place. Like she says in that video up there, “Let us turn the education of 40 girls into 40 million girls”. You can help her with that by donating to the fund as close to immediately as you can manage.

When last we met I was banging on about politicising the office, turning a bunch of disaffected social workers into an army of right-on activists taking to the streets. You’ll recall the plan was to splash images of the prophet Gore around the place to get some interest going in yer basic environmentalism, bombard them with information about the bedroom tax and how it’ll affect our service users to get them into the politics, and have them heading a protest march by the end of the month. This plan, as good as it was, has undergone a number of changes. I chose instead to perform a more intimate form of awareness-raising, staging a bed-in in which I was joined, in place of Yoko Ono, by the flu, a chest infection, suspected whooping cough and colossal amounts of self-pity. It’s been less effective than I’d hoped.

Before I was struck down in what is very sadly my prime I’d gone along to a public meeting that was looking to organise this march against the bedroom tax, flanked by some guy who’d told me about it and some other guy who follows me around like a second bumhole. You’ll recall the bedroom tax is the government’s latest wheeze to screw over the people who dare use the welfare system designed for people exactly like them. It looks to withhold housing benefit from people with unoccupied bedrooms, working on the assumption all those Daily Mail stories about benefit claimants in mansions are not only true but typical. It looks to hurt a disproportionate number of disabled people, this being Iain Duncan Smith’s consolation for failing to turn 101 cancer patients into that fancy coat he wanted.

It was my first time at this kind of thing. It was equal parts interesting, exciting and cringey. Certainly all the activist stereotypes were there: the worthy types getting all flustered and excited like revolution was upon us; the angry types getting all loud and ranty and shoutier than thou; the self-promoters making it all about them; the veterans still fighting Thatcher; the would-be anarchists talking up riots and vandalism, having come from the office via Pret. Lots of vanity talk. Lots of people having a moment. And not one concise fucker in the room. Everyone who spoke made a good point fairly quickly, liked the round of applause they got and banged on for ten minutes trying for another. For the budding activist looking to keep hold of modesty and self-awareness it was all a bit trying. For the cynical bastard it was all a bit fish and barrel. But cynicism kills this kind of thing. I put it aside.

Then they brought on Tommy Sheridan. You’ll recall he’s the former socialist MSP who was jailed for his folk-hero protests against the poll tax and the Faslane nuclear base. And also for his perjury in the defamation trial following the News of the World’s allegations he attended a swinger’s club. He’s a little toxic, our Tommy. He’s easy to discredit. He could, by association, discredit the campaign. He could be off-putting to people with only half an interest in it. And he could be eyeing this as his chance to get back in the spotlight. All things considered, him being involved is like taking a dump in a jacuzzi and asking everyone to jump in. That said, he was a great speaker. He made actual points. He stayed focused. He made useful comparisons to past campaigns without sounding stuck in the past. He urged the organisers to get organised. I agreed with basically everything he said, and wished someone else had said it all.

On 16 April a petition is being submitted to the Scottish Parliament calling on the SNP government to use its power to counter the threat of eviction for rent arrears in local authority tenancies. I’ll be part of the crowd outside Holyrood cheering it on, assuming I’m not struck down by smallpox or gout.